VoidPointer
Guide or Reference for Quality UX With CLI Applications
I'm not at all looking for guidance on writing my own parser. That would be daft with those already available. I'm using Cocona Lite for my current project and am very happy with it. I was looking for the type of design advice that helps me choose between having e.g. a sort ascending option and a sort descending option, or have a sort direction argument. All the parsers I know make either way of doing this very easy. I'm concerned about the ergonomics of how the cli input is structured, not how to interpret it.
35 replies
Guide or Reference for Quality UX With CLI Applications
I've previously used Spectre on this project and read their documentation on command parsing, and didn't find what I'm asking for. I found how to create commands, arguments, and options, but not how to uses these for optimum UX. The document on Command Line Interface Guidelines, at https://clig.dev, goes a long way to answer me, and if my question elicits nothing but criticism, I will close the post by reason of the one answer I have found myself. I was just hoping somebody might know about a similar resource to the single one I found.
35 replies
Guide or Reference for Quality UX With CLI Applications
I have no idea, and it really does very little to answer my question. having a pretty console UI and a good command parser does not automatically introduce good design and UX principles and practices for CLI applications. Either the poster has a fetish for Spectre or is a shill for it.
35 replies
Guide or Reference for Quality UX With CLI Applications
I've done some looking around and found this group. I think the open source document Command Line Interface Guidelines will prove tremendously helpful for what I am looking for, and if nobody knows of any such resources, just that may be enough for me to close this post a bit later.
35 replies
Guide or Reference for Quality UX With CLI Applications
Thanks for the feedback, but the argument vs option part of this is only part of the question, and I quite understand what arguments vs options are. I'm looking for resources on how to design a CLI, from an ergonomic and user-centric point of view.
In my current, very simple use-case, I have the command or verb and the path to a file to be analysed as arguments, and how to sort the output as an option. That's quite neat and meets my usability and user-friendly expectations. Yet now, as the app grows and I add more commands, it becomes more challenging to maintain usability and ergonomic standards with a growing range of possible arguments and options. Right now I even ask should the sort option take a direction, like
--sort asc|desc, or should I have two mutually exclusive sort options, like --sort-asc and -sort-desc. This has a medium to high priority because many commands will have a sort option, and they should all be uniform. That they should at least be uniform for all commands is one of the set of design guidelines I'm looking for, but it was a fairly obvious one I know instinctively as a user and as an engineer.
I'm quite sure the designers of various shells, like Bash, Zsh, and Fish, and PowerShell, have put some thought into this usability aspect, and while I can study all of these and extract the good stuff and improve on the bad for my CLI, I'm sure papers and articles have been written on in, even if no studies done. I think a look at the Gnu and POSIX conventions and their background and or history will be helpful to be, thanks.35 replies
Query Rider TODO etc. comments for a solution, project, or file into console output
Yes, I could, thanks, but as I'm busy writing a tool to query C# source, I got stuck on the idea of including it as a feature there. I suppose I could even run my search tool from my code in the query app
3 replies
Unexplained Duplicates in Method Signatures Query
Thanks for looking at it at least. The problem was I was calling
methods.AddRange(cls.Methods) for each class, or something like that - my commits were quite badly thought out the time and I can't find the error, and with two classes with the same method in one file I was getting the duplicates.4 replies
How to Automate Code Compare and Merge
We don't have enough tests, and the exco is happy with us and the QA team testing with Postman. It's way complicated from how the 200 odd projects in the solution (that's 400 with both versions) have evolved.
Some logging is done via a helper and some is just done my string concats. For this merge part of the project it matters more which method is used than whether two methods get the same logs written.
5 replies
Appsettings not mapping to Options class
Sorry guys, the use of options in this project was royally screwed up be whoever tried it, so they reverted to manually reading env vars for cassandra, and mine weren't getting read. I'll close this now as a bad joke.
17 replies
Postman Scripts to Compare Responses
Thanks. I would much rather do tests from a C# integration test project, but it's a current team convention to use Postman, and I need to get a few basic tests running there before doing stuff my way. I am already running multiple services on separate ports, but we have two of each service, one for v4 and one for v5, and the pain point I mentioned is that each of these two has the same
launchSettings.json, so my first idea is to have one start-up config for v4 projects, and run the collection using that start-up, then run it again using the start-up for v5 projects and compare the saved responses.5 replies